TATTOOED WARRIORS: The Next Generation; Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law

By GINGER THOMPSON; Dan Alder contributed reporting for this article.

Published: September 26, 2004

Christi?Ant? chokes back a scream as the nurse sticks a needle above his left eyebrow. ''Ay, Mam?' he shouts. ''It really hurts.''

''Don't move,'' the nurse tells him, sticking him again and again with anesthesia.

He pleads for a break. At least four other men, all covered with tattoos, are taking needles around him, on their arms and legs, backs and chests. The whining rises from the chairs. One man has a tattoo on his scalp. Another has one over his top lip. Yet another on his neck. Mr. Ant?, 22, has them everywhere.

The men have all come to this makeshift clinic in a neighborhood ravaged by street violence for a desperate and disfiguring kind of healing: to have their gang tattoos removed.

''Society thinks we are monsters,'' Mr. Ant? said. ''The police want us dead. That's why we do this. If we do not take off these tattoos, we will never be able to live in peace.''

The pain, he said, seems a small price for a new life. ''I dream of being clean, even if it means being scarred.''

They are gang members, known here as ''maras,'' after a species of swarming ants. Indeed, over the last decade gangs have spread like a scourge across Central America, Mexico and the United States, setting off a catastrophic crime wave that has turned dirt-poor neighborhoods into combat zones and an equally virulent crackdown that has left thousands of gang members dead, in hiding, in jail or heading to the United States.

The authorities estimate there are 70,000 to 100,000 gang members across Central America and Mexico. In the last decade, gangs have killed thousands of people, sowing new fear in a region still struggling to overcome civil wars that ended just a decade ago. Gangs have replaced guerrillas as public enemy No. 1.

The presidents of Honduras and El Salvador have called the gangs as big a threat to national security as terrorism is to the United States. They have revived old counterinsurgency strategies and adopted zero-tolerance laws known as Mano Dura, which loosely translates as ''firm hand,'' that bypass basic rules of due process and allow them to send young men to prison for nothing more than a gang tattoo.

Instead of offering reassurance, official campaigns inflame public fear. And in the last year, human rights investigators have begun to report alarming increases in the numbers of young men killed by the police and vigilantes.

No one denies that gang violence requires a tough response. No one -- not even the nurses who remove his tattoos -- feel sympathy for men with brutal histories, like Mr. Ant?. But many human rights advocates and community leaders worry that the aggressive measures governments are taking against gangs have not solved the problem as much as they have spread it.

Thousands of gang members are fleeing north, moving with and preying on the waves of illegal migrants who travel to the United States, which is taking aggressive measures of its own and deporting thousands of gang members on immigration violations. The effect is to churn the gangs throughout the region.

As gang members move, the gang culture moves with them. Police departments across the United States call the gangs a top crime problem. In January, some 72 departments met to discuss the issue in Los Angeles. Another gang summit meeting by law enforcement authorities will be held in Washington on Thursday.

In Guatemala, the authorities say gun violence will kill 1,000 more people this year, compared with two years ago. Gangs, they say, will commit 80 percent of those killings.

The Mexican state of Chiapas, which shares a lawless border with Guatemala, has become another gang hunting ground. Gangs strike in parks and bus stations. During the last year, gang members reportedly killed more than 70 migrants stowed away on northbound freight trains.

In a rare display of solidarity last year, the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama and Mexico signed an agreement to begin exploring ways to collaborate in the fight against gangs. They stopped short of adopting measures as tough as those in Honduras and El Salvador.

But in countries crippled by official corruption and impunity, the crackdowns have weakened the rule of law as much as they have stemmed the rise in crime.

Prisons are filled way beyond capacity with young men waiting months before they are formally charged. Overcrowded cellblocks have turned into death traps, with hundreds of gang members killed in suspicious riots and fires.

Some gang members, picked up by the police, never make it to jail. Their battered bodies litter streets and fields. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Honduras's National Commission for Human Rights, have reported incidents of gang members being kidnapped, tortured and killed by the same kinds of secret security forces responsible for the disappearances of hundreds of suspected leftists during the civil war years.

Commissioner Ram?ustodio has described the killings as a ''slow social cleansing,'' often involving youth with no criminal record.

Reports by Amnesty International and the State Department have echoed similar warnings.